Why Pradeep Needs You to Give Him The Codes

Business executives say schools are hampered by overbearing bureaucracy and a focus on rote learning rather than critical thinking and comprehension. Government keeps tuition low, which makes schools accessible to more students, but also keeps teacher salaries and budgets low. What's more, say educators and business leaders, the curriculum in most places is outdated and disconnected from the real world.

No kidding -- *cough* Turbo C.

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But 75% of technical graduates and more than 85% of general graduates are unemployable by India's high-growth global industries, including information technology and call centers, according to results from assessment tests administered by the group.

Perhaps because they've cheated their way through school?

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"I was not prepared at all to get a job," says Pradeep Singh, 23, who graduated last year from RKDF College of Engineering, one of the city of Bhopal's oldest engineering schools.
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Mr. Singh and several other engineering graduates said they learned quickly that they needn't bother to go to some classes. "The faculty take it very casually, and the students take it very casually, like they've all agreed not to be bothered too much," Mr. Singh says. He says he routinely missed a couple of days of classes a week, and it took just three or four days of cramming from the textbook at the end of the semester to pass the exams.

Others said cheating, often in collaboration with test graders, is rampant. Deepak Sharma, 26, failed several exams when he was enrolled at a top engineering college outside of Delhi, until he finally figured out the trick: Writing his mobile number on the exam paper.

That's what he did for a theory-of-computation exam, and shortly after, he says the examiner called him and offered to pass him and his friends if they paid 10,000 rupees each, about $250. He and four friends pulled together the money, and they all passed the test.

"I feel almost 99% certain that if I didn't pay the money, I would have failed the exam again," says Mr. Sharma.

This certainly follows my observations here, that the culture of cheating is quite pervasive.

Think about Pradeep the next time he asks you to give him the codes. Western companies: remember this when you off-shore programming jobs and get crap code that need to be thrown out and rewritten. Penny-wise is often pound-foolish.

Re: Why Pradeep Needs You to Give Him The Codes

Re: Why Pradeep Needs You to Give Him The Codes

Posted 15 April 2011 - 12:54 PM

The attitude from that part of the world regarding work vs. rewards isn't confined to the dev or education industries. I get no fewer than 20 emails per week from "headhunters" who scraped my email address from some site like Dice and then email me with opportunities for 3 month, low-paying crap contracts 12 states away. I've had them call my house (how they got my number I have no idea). They don't bother to read where I live (Atlanta, GA area) nor the fact that my posting on Dice explicitly said I had no interest in anything outside the area. Nah, what matters is that they spam the unholy hell out of your inbox for every stupid job they run across hoping for a hit.

I've taken to asking who the employer is and a couple of them have been dumb enough to tell me. I then contact HR at the employer and have told them what their "recruiters" have been doing. Got one email back from a recruiter cussing me...I think. I don't speak Indian/dumbass...but it did contain the phrase "fucking guy"...so I assumed he was upset at me.

Re: Why Pradeep Needs You to Give Him The Codes

Posted 26 April 2011 - 10:55 AM

i keep thinking i misread that one part. he writes his phone# on the exam, and its like common knowledge that is the code for hey, you want to take a bribe so i can pass this test? wow, i'm honestly really surprised at that. i figured the unemployable rate might be pretty high, but that just takes it to a new level.

Re: Why Pradeep Needs You to Give Him The Codes

Posted 03 September 2011 - 11:56 AM

I've had the misfortune of leading teams of what are considered the "good ones." What a joke. One guy had 10 years of experience and considered himself "senior" because of it, but was completely clueless. The combination of his arrogance and ignorance made him impossible not to fire because the others on the team admired him.

Re: Why Pradeep Needs You to Give Him The Codes

250 USD to pass a test? That's a lot of money. Might as well just study.

Studying won't matter. The teacher just has it in for this kid now.

I have seen this situation. that kind of stuff is rampant here in Pakistan at the secondary education level. Fortunately, there are many private universities here who actually are competing with each other to give better education in technology. And the cheating and bribing pretty much stops at university level.

Re: Why Pradeep Needs You to Give Him The Codes

Posted 11 September 2012 - 07:21 AM

More anecdotal evidence from The Daily WTF, although the country of origin is not mentioned...

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Quite a few of these offshore developers come for a master's degree at our local university. From what I've seen (and what I've heard from some professor friends) they all come with identical resumes with 4.0 GPAs from their undergraduate work at the same no-name college in their home country so the university has no real way of weeding out the good candidates from the bad. Most of them are bad and can't even find the power button on a computer without step-by-step instructions. Then they lie and cheat their way through the graduate program, and they refuse to think for themselves. On test days the whole class will bunch up and let one guy do all the work and they just copy. Then they don't understand why the professors get mad at this.

This post has been edited by JackOfAllTrades: 11 September 2012 - 11:37 AM

Re: Why Pradeep Needs You to Give Him The Codes

Posted 11 September 2012 - 09:50 AM

At the 2 year technical college I received my Associates from back in May, I always had a lot of respect for my instructors. I still remember walking into my Visual Basic course the first day, and there being about 33 bodies in the classroom. Fast-forward 1 week, and we're down to roughly 16. A week after that had 10.

The instructors chose to pass on the first day lectures about the syllabi and instead get right to work. They purposely assigned challenging, but doable, homework the first couple of weeks simply to weed out the truly interested from the money hungry and lazy dreamers.

When I walked across the stage in May, there were a grand total of 7 of us from the Computer Programming department graduating. Out of those 7, counting myself, I would in my personal opinion say 5 were good Programmers capable of working professionally as Software Developers and rising through the ranks.

Be it the Gym, Sports, Education, or Work, you get out what you put into it.

Re: Why Pradeep Needs You to Give Him The Codes

Posted 11 September 2012 - 11:40 AM

I think this points to a huge scam being perpetrated on the Western higher education system by some foreign students. It's really, really sad for a couple of reasons. First, it's keeping deserving students from higher education based on fraudulent credentials, and second, look at the list of professors at many of our colleges nowadays; how many of these foreign professors got here fraudulently as well?

Re: Why Pradeep Needs You to Give Him The Codes

Posted 11 September 2012 - 11:59 AM

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First, it's keeping deserving students from higher education based on fraudulent credentials

So these schools are admitting people who they shouldn't be admitting, and that's something I'm supposed to be worrying about? Why? More students admitted, especially foreign students paying top-rate tuition, means the school expands, means more places in the school, not less.

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second, look at the list of professors at many of our colleges nowadays; how many of these foreign professors got here fraudulently as well?

I don't know. Do you know of any that "got here fraudulently"? Any at all?
What does this mean, anyway? They "fraudulently" published peer-reviewed papers and passed hiring committees and review boards, and served as associate professors teaching classes? What do you mean, fraudulently?